


The Greatest Gift in the Galaxy

by BelcherMorganJames



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Miracles, Christmas Presents, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Minor Ian Chesterton/Barbara Wright, Snow, Snowball Fight
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28243815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BelcherMorganJames/pseuds/BelcherMorganJames
Summary: The TARDIS arrives in a Christmas Land - a amalgam over Christmas from across the universe. Ian and Barbara discover the means of giving the best gift in the galaxy; if they can make it back from home first.
Relationships: First Doctor & Companion(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	The Greatest Gift in the Galaxy

With it’s typically arresting thud at the climax of it’s whirring engines, the TARDIS came in and made the softest landing I recall ever it having made. Under normal circumstances, we’d each grip the central control console for support and the Doctor with quickly lose his temper and tell us all not to tinker with his systems. But this time, a perfect, gentle and delicate halt that barely made a shiver to disturb by toes in my shoes.

I could already tell from the tension at the corner of Barbara’s mouth that she was on the cusp of making a remark I knew she’d regret immediately afterwards; as she started to speak I quickly leapt in – “Quite the landing, Doctor. Barely felt a thing.” I placed a congratulatory hand on his shoulder.

He just looked at me as if he’d only just remembered I was there.

“Oh, Chetterton”, he uttered exasperated, “must you sneak up on me like that?” I felt I could actually hear Barbara’s expression of ‘that-told-you’ without her even needing to say anything. “I was merely congratulating you on such a smooth landing, Doctor.”

“Oh. Oh, that? Think nothing of it, my boy, nothing at all” he chortled, returning to the instruments after clearly dismissing the conversation from all thought, the speed at which his expression hardened again. Vicki was staring up at the scanner – it was a crisp white with little else to be seen; she pondered aloud if there was maybe something covering the view outside.

“Snow!” Barbara exclaimed excitedly, “we’ve landed somewhere snow-covered”.

“That seems to concur with the readings on the dials, Miss Wright,” the Doctor replied, “the temperature of the outer shell of the ship is reading about -2 degrees celsius, adequate temperature for snow”. I’d never been much for snow; oh, I’d marvel at it out of my living room window whenever it’d fall in my childhood home in Barnsbury but once I’d been out to play with my friends in it once and disrupted the surface, made it all uneven and disturbed, that would’ve been enough for me.

Vicki had taken the liberty of bringing our winter cloaks and pairs of gloves from the wardrobe for us to go and explore; I’d somehow suspected from the short time we’d been travelling companions that as soon as we’d landed somewhere with snow, Vicki would’ve been keen as mustard to lob a snowball at one of us.

We stepped out of the TARDIS, the top of which had a large coating of suspended ice crystals, almost forming a drift, adorning it. The Doctor took out his key and locked the door and instructed us all to keep close together as we explored. As we embarked through a line of snow-covered shrubbery about 11-feet high, which seemed to form a defensive ring around the centre of wherever we’d wound up this time, I was concerned that we may lose the TARDIS in this maze of foliage.

“Oh, stop fretting Ian,” Barbara told me, sternly but firmly, “I hardly feel like I should point out to you that we can simply follow our footsteps back to the ship, must I?”

“Ah, but what if it snows again; our footprints will be filled in. Then what will we do?”

This time it was Vicki’s turn to castigate me for being silly; “Then we’ll simply have to head back in the direction we’re heading in now and we’ll find it again.” I was about to argue again but Barbara threatened to drop a clump of snow down my collar so I relented with a chittering chuckle to match the bitter chill.

The Doctor’s swishy cloak came to a grinding halt in front of us. “Good heavens”, he said, gaping at the sight which lay before us. It was an enormous Christmas colony, stretching out as far as the eye could see – it was almost like a city comprised for various Christmas symbolism. Barbara clung to my upper arm, a look of whimsical joy on her face. She’d always loved Christmas and had always been a very tradition-bound woman.

I looked over at the Doctor, his face a bizarre culmination of befuddlement, incredulity and warmth all in one, fighting to be the dominant emotional state. Although, I could sense that there was something else concealed beneath his gruff Scroogian veneer that I couldn’t quite place. “What are you thinking, Doctor?” I asked him.

This seemed to jog him from his distance and he turned to me with a distinctly jocular disposition, “I was just thinking what I charming little community we’ve come across here”. Barbara argued his flippant use of the word ‘little’.

“Oh, my dear Barbara. Size is entirely relative; for all we know, this could be this planet’s equivalent to your Earth’s, uh, Painswick.” He concluded his though with another signature chuckle, holding Vicki, who seemed just a jubilant, to his side like a gentle grandparent.

I knew I recognised that expression from before – Susan. As much as he valued Vicki’s company, I suppose she, nor Barbara or I could compare to that which he shared when Susan was his only companion. He cared very deeply for his granddaughter, I’ll never forget the extent of bravery I had seen the man demonstrate that day he left her to remain living on that Dalek-liberated Earth with David – good old David. I did wonder from time to time how they were getting on.

I didn’t have much time to dwell on it; the Doctor was already setting off towards the gathering of people so Barbara and I had to pace to keep up with he and Vicki.

* * *

It wasn’t really a festival, it was a bit too colonial for that. I thought to myself that it was almost like a way of life for many of the people that lived there – lots of people of many shapes and sizes. I could tell that the Doctor was in his elements here, lots of fascinating new creatures to meet and study. The childlike grin on his face was broader than any other grin I’d seen him display before.

“Come thee! Open thee! The gifts that keep on giving!” A little girl was speeding through the rows not unlike a bat out of hell, thrusting white specks at every passer-by that crossed her path and launching odd tapered tubes in the air after her. She raced past the Doctor and Vicki with remarkable stamina and Barbara and I got a good laugh at the old traveller get a large puff of icy speckles all over his nose and suddenly sneeze hard enough to land him on his backside in a snowdrift that a stall’s leg was propped up in.

I lent the Doctor my arm to raise himself to his feet, harrumphing all the way. “Good grief, Chesterton. I don’t need mollycoddling; and don’t think I didn’t notice you hyena routine over there”, he swept his finger in the direction of where I and Barbara had been standing. Over his shoulder, he failed to notice Vicki toying with an array of snowballs of different shape and size until she thrust one up over her head and it smashed to smithereens over mine; that certainly raised his spirits again.

Vicki was quite tickled by the display, “Sorry, Ian.” She looked as if she was going to tell me what she was originally trying to hit but thought better of it. “I thought it was curious that this person was selling snowballs. It seems quite a needless trade here, wouldn’t you say?”

I agreed. “Perhaps they’re made up of different snows, from different places of this planet?” Barbara chimed in, clearly unsure about the veracity of her own argument. Then, to everybody’s astonishment, the snowball that has been blasted apart upon impact with my hair, started to pull itself together, almost like magic.

It fully returned to form as a perfect sphere, resting and nestled in my hairline; I let my head tilt slightly and it rolls off my head and landed squarely in the Doctor’s cupped hands. He examined it with his monocle, “Remarkable! Absolutely remarkable.” he commented, gleaming through his worn monocle. Barbara was equally impressed, perhaps even more so than I was, and I’m a scientist. “You’re right there. It was almost like magic.”

“Magic? I doubt that.”

“Oh, you’re just sporting from it smashing against the big, smart aleck brain of yours.”

“Perhaps”, I chuckled, putting my arm over Vicki’s shoulder.

“So,” she asked, quizzically, “what do you want to do first?”

“First, my child?” the Doctor seemed almost nonplussed by the idea of exploring further, but we could all tell he wasn’t in the slightest.

“Well, look around! We’ve landed in a place where Christmas seems to have spanned the length of miles and snowballs come back together as if by magic. We’ve got to explore a little bit, haven’t we?”

Barbara confessed that she too was eager to take a stroll through this snow-laden city. The Doctor ran his thumb up and down his lapel thoughtfully whilst Vicki took him up in a pleading embrace. He looked down at her and then at us and lapsed into a warm smile. “Yes, yes, I suppose we should take a little time. A place like this may very well have something that will amuse me.”

The ladies all but jumped for joy at this decision and rushed off in opposing directions to explore. “But, we haven’t decided on a place to meet back yet!” he called after them, not that either of them were in earshot or possessing of any attention to hear him. I told him to bring them back to that snowball stand in a few hours and that seemed to appease him.

With our rendezvous point established, the Doctor broke into a gentlemanly stroll to catch up with the rambunctious Vicki while I in turn made after Barbara, hoping to catch her before she located something similar to a library. I couldn’t imagine the turmoil it would be trying to get her to leave one if she stumbled across it.

* * *

In the three hours that Barbara and I had been traversing miles and miles of isles, Barbara had bought a new scarf and bested me at a snow arching contest, though she had only won because she clearly had a better understanding of those ridiculous rules than I did. We attended a feast at what my watch understood to be what was 5 o’clock, quite a sizeable array of delicacies from hundreds of different planets and species set out on trays and plates and even pedestals; there were blue fabrics dressing the tables of Venusian lidra fruit-cakes and strange stalks emerging from certain stalls with sprouting tendrils forming elaborate loops with vials of a purple and red substance the locals told me was Allarallin bresk wine.

The Doctor refused to allow Vicki to sample the wine; his grandfatherly instincts still withstanding Barbara and I concurred, so we sought out something that we were confident didn’t have any alcoholic traces and was consumable by humans, settling on a half-liquid and half-solid bar of famous Rull sapdrop. I even took a swig of it myself, though Barbara indicated that I may have drank a little too much bresk wine for me to be a suitable judge on it’s quality. I must admit, I did feel a little unsteady on my feet, much to Vicki’s entertainment, so a local told me to eat one of their snowballs and it rendered me a little more cognisant.

“Oh, what a wonderful evening this has been!” Barbara exclaimed, taking me by the arm, with a tender amusement watching my still adjusting eyes. The dim light that had been above us when we’d arrived had slowly but surely thawed and now was a bluey-turquoise blanket of blinking stars shining above us.

“Look at that, the snow is now shining,” I pointed to the illuminating ground, “a natural phosphorescence in the water molecules it’s composed of, maybe?”

“Oh, nonsense, my boy! This snow can pull itself back together all of it’s own volition.” The Doctor and Vicki and joined us while Barbara and I had been getting out bearings. “It may have a superficial resemblance to the snow you have back in London, but I assure you that it’s nothing of the sort.”

“And I, uh, I suppose you imagine it’s some kind of alien life form all of it’s own, perhaps, Doctor?”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t discount it, Chesterton. Life takes all sorts of shapes and forms and sizes.”

“Maybe it’s a type of gestalt entity?” Vicki chimed in.

Barbara sighed deliberately loudly to get our attention, “Oh, please, not all of this science talk. It’s Christmas! Can we agree, at least for tonight, that we don’t need to understand the magic for it to be there?” We all took in what she said silently before the Doctor took off his wooly had and pocket it, agreeing to this request in unspoken terms.

“I propose that we spend at least one more hour exploring before we head back to the TARDIS. After all, we wouldn’t want to stay out all night, would we?”

Before Vicki could argue, the Doctor took her to the shoulder back to the buffet tables, which, at night, didn’t look too unlike a whole street. Barbara sidled up to me again, “It’s very like the Doctor to object to gratuitous celebration, isn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t let him spoil it for you, Barbara.”

“I suppose he could have celebrated Christmas before, but this will be his first one without Susan.”

“Let’s not press him on that matter. Let’s see if we can get a little bit more exploring done before we come back to find them.”

We turned to head off again in a new direction when we saw the same little girl from earlier that afternoon come charging through, shouting, albeit a little more gently, almost singing, the same she had before: “Come thee! Open thee! The Gifts that keep on giving!” She was thrusting the same tubes to and fro all over the place. Barbara caught a stray one sent flying by the arching ranges swing and fumbled with it, “It looks almost like a Christmas cracker, doesn’t it?”

I twiddled it in my fingers and gripped one end of it, “Yes, I suppose it does. How’s about it, Barbara?”

Barbara laughed aloud and gripped the other end, “Why not? We’re only human.”

We both pulled on the cracker but it simply wouldn’t break. We both dug our heels in as best we could in the shifty snow and tugged and tugged but it simply wouldn’t give in. I can’t deny, I was slightly disappointed by that, unable to enjoy an old Londoner tradition. “Tough little blighter, isn’t it?”

“You aren’t doing it right is why,” the child told us from behind, only to receive a look of puzzlement from us both, “the magic has not be cast.”

Barbara practically lit up when she mentioned magic; she truly fawned over Christmas, she always had, even back home. After a moment’s speechlessness, Barbara lowered her stance to meet the girl’s gaze, “Hello, what magic would you be referring to.”

The girl, Tilpher, took the cracker from me and neatly straightened the ends of it back into their tubular form, “The magic of the gift, Miss Lady. Every cracker has the magic of the gift if it is given in earnest.”

“The magic of the gift? You mean, these crackers each contain a gift?”

Tilpher remained sweetly expressionless, which I felt was a rather physical contradiction in terms. “Not exactly. The breaking of the cracker lets the magic be free – for the magic to be free a gift must be given and the wish shall be fulfilled.”

Barbara almost froze in place before promptly taking me to one side, “Ian, if what she says is true and those crackers can make wishes come true... well, don’t you understand?”

It suddenly hit me, “You mean, we could wish ourselves back to our own time and place?”

Tilpher stuck her head in between us and gave us both a sorrowful glance, “You do not understand. For every wish that is given must come an equivalent exchange unless it is a gift given without ulterior intent and complete faith.”

I’m sorry to say that neither Barbara and I had really listened to what she had said; the prospect of getting home was one too great to let be dismissed. I dropped to me knees and took the cracker from Tilpher. “What if Barbara and I were to gift our wish to one another with the cracker?”

“I cannot stop you; you must recognise your own folly. Follow your wish, Mr Sir.” I turned by attention to Barbara and her to me for only a moment but once we had returned it to the girl, she had disappeared and left a fresh cracker at my feet. I took it in my hands and grappled it between by quivering fingers, “We can go home, Barbara. We can go _home!_ ”

I raised the cracker’s farthest end to within Barbara’s grasp and she took it, tenuously but firmly. “It looks like we can. I... I suppose we both just wish it and break the cracker and then we’ll be home”. My grip got harder, stronger and I could almost feel Barbara’s own doing the same thing across the other side of the snow drift.

I cleared my throat and proclaimed my intent; “I wish for Miss Barbara Wright to return home to London in the 1960s!”

Barbara cleared her throat and proclaimed her intent; “I wish for Mr Ian Chesterton to return home to London in the 1960s!”

We bid each other the best of luck and everybody in eyeshot turned to face us as, with all the faith we could muster, we pulled the cracker apart and the snap shot out in echo around us – the auditory equivalent of a bright flash of white light.

* * *

I came in for a rude awakening, a tiny thud against my forehead and a cold, damp substance rolled off my eyebrow and I roused to feel snow beneath the palm of my hand. But I didn’t press down into it to feel just more snow – it wasn’t snow but grass. It couldn’t feel the colour, obviously, but undeniably grass and my eyes shot wide open. I took to my feet with a speed surprising even me and looked down to see Barbara nestled against the snow-lathered tree roots melting the snow around her in outline resembling her position laying down.

I almost choked on my own breath – there was a car, an Honest-to-God car, wheels, bonnet, mirrors, the works. I trudged over to it, still dazed from what I hoped was our journey and saw, lodged under the windscreen wiper, a ticket issued 19 December _1964_.

“Barbara... Barbara!” I shot back to the base of the tree and roused her as gently and as excitedly as I could, “We’ve made it, London, 1964! Like we’ve never been away.”

Barbara was still decidedly muggy from her rather undignified travel home but she came too with as impressive speed as I had and let me lead her to that parking ticket. Even I was jumping with excitement, scooping her up in a broad hug and swinging her on the spot.

Home. We couldn’t believe it – we’d come home.

The cracker fell out of Barbara’s coat pocket; we both noticed only then that we were wearing the same clothes we had when we went away. It took the cracker up from the snowy ground and raised it to the sky like the Holy Grail and shouted to the skies, “Around the world and back again!” Barbara just laughed at my jubilant theatrics and snatched the cracker from the grasp. She wasn’t even interested by the fact that it had miraculously come back together, simply traipsing over to the nearest bin and dropping it inside.

A snowball hit my back from some ways off and I turned to observe a small group of little girls holding a pair each between them, barring the head girl, who had attempted to thrust one of her pair at a friend but hit me instead. The looked nervous and start slowly withdrawing but I settling my face into a relaxed smile, balled up the snow at the base of my shoe and threw one back, hitting the girl at the back and knocking off her bobble hat.

“Game on!” I declared and started forming snowballs to throw while the girls hurled each of theirs at me. Barbara started laughing heartily at us from behind the tree before taking up an enormous lump of snow and used both arms to throw it at us all. The game had begun and Christmas had commenced.

* * *

Barbara had gone home some hours ago; even for her, she had seen me get hit with enough snowballs for one day. I had gone for a long walk along my lost-missed city and surpassed the junkyard close to my school; I stood, eyes glazing over it’s big blue gates, fawning for reasons that I couldn’t quite comprehend. I picked up on a voice someway off, an old man’s voice shouting indignantly against a additional pair of gentlemen’s attempts to settle his frayed tempers.

“I thought you people felt the value of family at Christmas!”

“Please, sir. There’s no need to be rude, we’ve told you this will be investigated.”

“But when?”

I followed the shouting to it’s source, a few feet outside the police box on a street corner that I’d only just recognised as Totter’s Lane. The irate old man stood clutching his clock, pressing it to his chest with a pair of opera spectacles settled on his nose; he was barking at a pair of simple policemen with moustaches so similar, you’d almost assume them to be twins.

“Please, Professor, kindly...”

“’Kindly’ nothing. This is a time of family, find me my granddaughter! Bring her home to me!”

**Author's Note:**

> My new Christmas tale - the all those here and everywhere who cannot spend this festive time with those they love. Stay safe out there and, if you can, have a lovely holiday and New Year.
> 
> Part Two - Miracle on Totter's Lane, will arrive between tonight and Christmas Day.
> 
> \- JMB


End file.
